epic



Post-Epic Editorial

We're thrilled and excited to say that we've now gone live with the second part of our Epic issue. Cordite 31.1: POST-EPIC aims, in the spirit of Ko Un's Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives), to produce 1,000 lines of epic poetry. Towards this end, the poets featured in our Epic issue have each nominated a line from their work to be used as the title and starting point for a new Post-Epic poem.

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Epic Editorial

When ‘Epic' was suggested as a theme for an issue of Cordite, I was expecting it to be either rejected outright or at least modified into something less archaic. When it was actually chosen as the theme for issue 31 with myself as the guest editor, I was faced with a more pressing concern: would we receive enough suitably epical submissions to justify our choice of this theme? Or would the dearth of appropriate contributions confirm that, as literary critic Tom Winnifrith has written, the epic is ‘as antique as a dinosaur', or, as Mikhail Bakhtin would have it, the epic poem is ‘an already completed genre … distanced, finished and closed'?

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J.H. Prynne and the Late-Modern Epic

The poetry of J.H. Prynne has recently come to the attention of an international set of poets and literary theorists. This attention has coincided with the release of his updated collected work, Poems, and, coincidently, with Prynne's retirement from a teaching position at the University of Cambridge and as a librarian at Gonville and Caius College. The attention that the rerelease of Poems has incited is due partially to a growing awareness of contemporary British Poetry, and marks the first time that Prynne's poetry has been made widely available outside of the small press publications of Cambridge.

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